blog/Eric Rodenbeck

Join us on May 18 for a Zoom conversation between @cooperhewitt curator @andrealipps7 + Stamen founder @ericrodenbeck! To RSVP visit the CooperHewitt.org website or go to sta.mn/d85. See you there!

(with apologies & in homage to Rainer Maria Rilke and William Burroughs) From time to time I get asked for advice by young people about paths to careers in dataviz. My path to the field started over twenty years ago. There was no Masters of Data Visualization at the New School when I went there,...

Whoa. Stamen HQ, quiet as cats When the lockdowns happened back in March 2020, we all started realizing that we weren’t going to be gathering together at Stamen HQ any time soon, and things got, well, weird. I love working at Stamen, and I think I speak for the rest of my team when I...

I’m beyond excited to be able to share that we’ve been working with The J Paul Getty Trust on visualizing the extraordinary work of the artist Ed Ruscha and his team on and around Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles for the last fifty years. The work is online at http://12sunsets.getty.edu/, is live as of today,...

Dataviz is clearly having a moment in the COVID-19 and social justice crisis — perhaps a definitive moment. Every time I turn around I see another chart, set of small multiples, dashboard. Some of them are great, some of them are just so-so, and some of them are actively dangerous, just like any other form of expression...

Relative mobility change across the United States, derived from Facebook data When it comes to slowing the relentless march of Covid-19, data is a powerful tool. Data has helped counties and states and countries track cases and deaths, determine the most effective ways to bend the curve, and see in real time whether actions are...

Stamen’s collaboration with UCSF takes on new urgency in the age of COVID-19. Kelly Morrison wrote the first draft of this post Nine months ago, a team from UCSF School of Medicine Dean’s Office of Population Health and Health Equity led by Dr. Debby Oh, hired us to build an online data visualization tool to...

We spend a lot of time making maps and data visualizations here at Stamen, and we’re pretty public about that. What we’ve been less public about is the time we spend reading maps and data visualizations. Research is a core part of our practice here, so in the spirit of a new decade (when data...

The last year of the decade gave us plenty of opportunities to work and play with data of all kinds, from governance indices to cloud storage data to a mostly unseen but truly vast archive of “motorized photographs” by Ed Ruscha. As always, it’s the diversity of projects that come through here that I’m most...

Thanks to Kelly Morrison for her help co-writing this post. Stamen was asked to create six maps using XYZ Studio, a new web app from HERE that allows users to create custom maps from large datasets. We sat down to talk about the process and the product (viewable at https://explore.xyz.here.com/gallery) with the map makers: Alan...